ATINER's Conference Paper Series PSY2013-0620
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ATINER CONFERENCE PAPER SERIES No: PSY2013-0620 Athens Institute for Education and Research ATINER ATINER's Conference Paper Series PSY2013-0620 Marginal and Unauthorized Grief, Denied and Omitted Rites Sonia Sirtoli Farber PhD Student EST- Escola Superior of Teologia Brazil 1 ATINER CONFERENCE PAPER SERIES No: PSY2013-0620 Athens Institute for Education and Research 8 Valaoritou Street, Kolonaki, 10671 Athens, Greece Tel: + 30 210 3634210 Fax: + 30 210 3634209 Email: [email protected] URL: www.atiner.gr URL Conference Papers Series: www.atiner.gr/papers.htm Printed in Athens, Greece by the Athens Institute for Education and Research. All rights reserved. Reproduction is allowed for non-commercial purposes if the source is fully acknowledged. ISSN 2241-2891 21/10/2013 2 ATINER CONFERENCE PAPER SERIES No: PSY2013-0620 An Introduction to ATINER's Conference Paper Series ATINER started to publish this conference papers series in 2012. It includes only the papers submitted for publication after they were presented at one of the conferences organized by our Institute every year. The papers published in the series have not been refereed and are published as they were submitted by the author. The series serves two purposes. First, we want to disseminate the information as fast as possible. Second, by doing so, the authors can receive comments useful to revise their papers before they are considered for publication in one of ATINER's books, following our standard procedures of a blind review. Dr. Gregory T. Papanikos President Athens Institute for Education and Research 3 ATINER CONFERENCE PAPER SERIES No: PSY2013-0620 This paper should be cited as follows: Sirtoli Farber, S. (2013) "Marginal and Unauthorized Grief, Denied and Omitted Rites " Athens: ATINER'S Conference Paper Series, No: PSY2013- 0620. 4 ATINER CONFERENCE PAPER SERIES No: PSY2013-0620 Marginal and Unauthorized Grief, Denied and Omitted Rites Sonia Sirtoli Farber PhD Student EST- Escola Superior of Teologia Brazil Abstract There is mourning that are not socially acceptable, whose production is complex and triggers pain and side effects: are the mourning unauthorized and mourning marginal. The Thanatology demonstrates that the cast of unauthorized mourning has a wide spectrum, is multifactorial and includes various types of losses, as the mourning for abandoning a child, surrogate motherhood, sexual impotence, abortion, no funeral, among many others. Often, those who face death symbolic, does not receive any social support or have empathy that characterizes the biological death and the mourning that arises from this. Deaths symbolic mourning require real and they are intrinsically linked to rites and expressions, which often are denied, hindering the development of loss and mourning satisfaction. Keywords: Mourning marginal. Mourning unauthorized. Rites. Corresponding Author: 5 ATINER CONFERENCE PAPER SERIES No: PSY2013-0620 Introduction Losses and breakdowns, resilience and uplifts are constant in the vital and dialectic process of human existence, these realities, no matter how challenging they may be, tend to allocate themselves and be assumed without further trauma, if those who experience them find support in the society in which they live. Helplessness is the crystallization of the existential state of those who have their mourning marginalized, and whose society has not authorized and accepted their grief. Everyday life realities can cause impacts of different kinds on people, depending on the subject who experiences them. Under this assumption, when the optimists face a problem, they may play "the glad game" and focus on the positive balance of that reality, on the learning acquired and on the life that remains. The realists may take memory as an element of resilience; memory is the access to the anamnetic collection, enabling a revisitation of events, emotions and people through the evocation of memories. The realists will select memories in their favor, considering the elaboration of their losses. Similar to the others, the pessimists tend to focus on the loss and damage that have been imposed to them, delaying the solution of their grief. Human complexity disrupts what theorists had compartmentalized and categorized by mixing the reactions to situations of greater mental and emotional demands, expressing the dialectics of joy and sadness. Parkes (1998) exemplifies this reality with a wedding scene, in which the bride's mother expresses ambivalent feelings, showing that the characterization of loss and grieving does not depend on another person's perception, for the subject will tell whether it is a reality of loss, gain or both, simultaneously. [...] The bride's mother is undergoing an important change that in her view can be considered as a profit or a net loss. She can mourn, rejoice or, due to that typical human ability, oscillate between tears and laughter. The Hard- headed researcher may find very difficult to classify these life events as losses or gains, like the daughter's marriage (Parkes, 1998, p.242). Events perceived as trivial and banal can impact severe losses, requiring a process to overcome it and mourn; but this mourning may be denied by society if it understands that the event did not cause hurt. In these cases, social hermeneutics may not recognize the process of elaboration of the loss and disallow the grief, imposing on the subject a condition of marginal, lonely and silent bereavement. There is a broad and diverse list of mourning. In this work, the followings have been selected to be analyzed: 1. Abandonment or placement of children for adoption: which we pointed as marginal mourning, since it is a symbolic death and there is no social synergy to experience grief. 2. Surrogacy: the bereavement due to this reality is unauthorized because society understands it as a reality sought by the woman who was willing to get pregnant in favor of others. 3. Procured Abortion is an example of double, unauthorized and marginal mourning; marginal because the woman hides the act and the result of this loss, unauthorized because, even in societies where it is lawful and legal 6 ATINER CONFERENCE PAPER SERIES No: PSY2013-0620 the practice of abortions, those who choose to abort do not find social empathy to express their grief. 4. Male sexual impotence: it is characterized as marginal mourning because it is not an actual death, but it is a symbolic one. 5. Presumed death: it is an example of an omitted rite; this form of loss finds social empathy, even though the grief is problematic. Abandonment or placement of children for adoption Parents who delegated the care of their children to others or are deprived of their child custody, even though they have been deprived of parental rights, cannot lose the right to establish the loss of their child(ren). Although the parents are eventually unable to maintain the child custody due to their life choices that threaten the child’s safety, they may have affection for the child(ren) and suffer as a result of the separation, having the need to process this grief. Despite the progresses in several areas of western society, it is still the woman/mother the one who is charged with preserving life, showing affection and caring for the children. If, in predictable situations and in the vast spectrum of what is understood and accepted as normal, women already spend a great amount of psychic energy with a sense of guilt for not matching up to what is expected from them. When a child is abandoned or given up for adoption, few wonder where the child’s father is and most project onto the mother the total charge of this decision. But both – mother and father – do not find in society the necessary empathy in order to develop their grief and, in most cases, not even to externalize it. In such situations, public opinion tends to follow the flow of the conventions and stereotypes, assuming the role of the prosecutor, judge and executioner of the sentence. Therefore, society does not grant these parents the right to suffer the loss of their child, for it understands that the parents chose the situation in which they find themselves. Grief is not authorized by society, and parents are forced to reorganize their lives, subliming the feelings that arise from their loss, causing the grief to extend, deepen up and, in more severe cases, become chronic and pathological. When a death occurs, the bereaved family is comforted and supported not only by the presence of the family and social community or by the words of comfort and sympathy, but also by the rites of passage that are facilitators of the transition from a state of life that comprehended the presence of the one who passed away to a new order and organization of life in which the departed will no longer be part of life in the way it did before. Rites of passage are effective mechanisms to raise awareness of the changes inherent in the life cycle. But the rites are omitted when the bereavements are marginalized or unauthorized. But when losses are not socially accepted, we have a grief that is not recognized, for this one there are no social rites, society does not comfort the bereaved, leaving them far from the possibility of overcoming the loss. Thus, 7 ATINER CONFERENCE PAPER SERIES No: PSY2013-0620 the bereaved people hide their grief, not allowing themselves to experience their pain. The grief that is not recognized is not allowed nor supported and must be hidden because when it is revealed it causes a more negative social response (MOTTA, 2001 cited in Petruce, L., Zimmer, S. & Smith, L.C. 2006 n/p). The emotional turmoil that reaches the one who experiences the loss of a child custody is similar, but it is more aggressive than that experienced by parents whose children have died because they had not had an opportunity to express their feelings, frustrations and guilt; making them grow exponentially and in silence.